EP 137: Get Your Time and Freedom Back by Breaking Through the Ceiling of Complexity
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If you're not getting up in the morning and planning out your week and your day and communicating that well with people and ensuring that if you see people doing things that likely aren't the highest priority that you're then reaching out to them and coaching them up and not telling them what they should do but teach them a process by which they can then discover what their priorities should be. Okay, not telling them what to do, teach them a process and saying, hey, how do you come up with your priorities for the week? I'm kind of curious, can you walk me through your process?

And once you discover their process, you can probably see a flaw and then you can give them a simpler approach, a simpler, more direct way to discover exactly what they should do. And it's going to simplify your life. Hope everyone had an amazing, amazing new year's Eve, new year's. Uh, that's the first episode of the care cast I'm recording in 2019. Uh, we published our first episode of the care cast, I think this last week that, and I recorded at the end of 2018. And, uh,

The reason I'm talking a little quiet right now, so you might have to turn up your volume, is a couple times a year I lose my voice. And today is one of those days. But I want to get a podcast out while it's on my mind. So bear with me as my voice might go in and out a little bit. But it's going to be a short episode. It's going to be talking about a concept that I talked about on my annual Epic Planning call a couple weeks ago. And that annual Epic Planning call had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people on it.

And it was a long call, you know, about two and a half hours long. But I just really dove into everything that's on my mind that I do to really have an amazing year. I reviewed my 2018, gave all my processes and systems, mindset shifts, everything.

the whole thing. So if you haven't watched that, go to carrot.com forward slash epic and go to carrot.com forward slash epic. And on the page after that, after you put in your information, you will see the replay of that page or of that video. You can watch it anytime you want. It's completely free. I had one person on Facebook actually the other day post, he said, basically Trevor could have charged a thousand dollars for this training and everyone needs to go check it out. So not charging anything. I just want to see you succeed this year.

Carrot.com forward slash epic, and you'll be able to download all my stuff, my routine and goal tracker spreadsheet, my new energy audit, everything over there. Okay. Carrot.com forward slash epic. But one of the topics I talked about on there was something called the ceiling of complexity. And the thing is we can't grow our businesses. We can't get more freedom. We can't get more of what we want unless we simplify. And oftentimes, uh,

When we feel like we're overwhelmed or we feel like you might even be growing a team, but you might feel like, oh, my gosh, I'm not just I'm not gaining any time. I'm not gaining any freedom. I'm not gaining. It just feels like I'm continually trying to keep up. It's probably because things are too complex and you're bumping against the ceiling of complexity. And what the ceiling of complexity is, it's this metaphorical.

that we all hit and you hit the thing, you bounce back down. You hit the thing, you bounce back down. You hit the thing, you bounce back down. It could be a revenue target that you continually keep bumping up against but not hitting. It could be time off or you keep feeling when I do this one extra thing, when I do this one extra thing, when I add this one extra person, I'll finally get more time and freedom. I'll finally get more freedom, but it doesn't. You keep hitting it, you keep bumping down. It could be happiness. It could be any of those. You keep hitting the ceiling and bouncing down and bouncing down.

The way you break through that is actually by simplifying. Oftentimes we're doing things way too complicated, and those complications actually end up stopping us from growing. So it could be a system. It could be a process. It could be those people that you're adding to the mix, to your team. Maybe you didn't give them good training, or you're not empowering them well enough to do their job, or they don't have good metrics that they're supposed to be latching on to.

It could be that you need to increase your own standards. You need to increase your own standards of yourself. And maybe the fix to it literally could be you spending an extra hour a week planning and getting ahead of the week and making sure that you know exactly what that week is supposed to be looking like. And you've been intentional with planning the week. Okay, it could be.

that if you're growing your team, maybe you just need to give better frameworks and systems to your team so they can lead and they can plan their own days better. What happens oftentimes when we hire teams is we think by adding people, it's going to save us time. But if the people that we're adding don't know how to plan their weeks effectively, and if they don't know how to make sure that the things that they're doing are driving the overall company's goals effectively,

it's actually going to be harder on you. It's actually going to create more work for you because then you're going to have to try to manage their crap too in addition to your own list. Instead, you should be teaching them how to discover, how to figure out what their priorities should be for the day. What's the process? What should they look at first? Is there a framework or worksheet you do? Train them on that. That's going to simplify everything for you. So the seeming complexity is something I learned from a guy named Dan Sullivan. Went through his coaching program in 2012. It's amazing. It was life-changing.

And for me, the way that I go through and combat the ceiling of complexity is two things. And I do it usually probably every year I hit these ceilings of complexity because as you add people or you add revenue or you add things, you add products, things like that, um, automatically things get more complex. Okay. And you need to then simplify it to grow. You need to simplify to grow. Okay. So right now we're 24 people just literally today. Our new VP of marketing started Kylie Newbold. He started here at Carrot and, um,

We've got some other people on the team that have started recently as well.

And where we are is in order to get through that ceiling of complexity we're currently hitting, it's process. You know, everyone's running into these issues where the information is locked into one person's brain. It could be the leader's brain. It could be my brain. Or where people aren't given a framework to make decisions, so therefore they might not make decisions at all. Or they wait for the leader to make decisions who becomes a bottleneck again. And you keep on hitting these ceilings.

It could be on sales. It could be that we need to simplify things.

the way that our sales happen through a simplified marketing funnel. Maybe we have too much going on in our marketing funnel, but if we focused in on one or two really key things, got rid of the rest of the marketing funnel, and we focused on one or two things and got really good and went really deep on those, we would grow, okay? We would grow much faster and we grew really fast this last year. So those are things we're tackling right now is we're looking at those constraints. We're looking at those constraints. What are those constraints? What are the bottlenecks?

that are a likely result of things being too complex, of people not being able to make decisions, of processes not being in place, of me not starting my day or my week well and organizing my day and my week, which then enables the whole rest of the team to have a more organized week. What a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize is us as the CEOs of the companies, we are the ones that throw off or help our team be successful.

If you're not getting up in the morning and planning out your week and your day and communicating that well with people and ensuring that if you see people doing things that likely aren't the highest priority, that you're then reaching out to them and coaching them up and not telling them what they should do, but teach them a process by which they can then discover what their priorities should be. Okay. Not telling them what to do, teach them a process and saying, Hey, how do you, how do you come up with your priorities for the week? I'm kind of curious. Can you walk me through your process? Okay.

And once you discover their process, you can probably see a flaw. And then you can give them a simpler approach, a simpler, more direct way to discover exactly what they should do. And it's going to simplify your life because now you're not having to follow up with them every day and go, hey, this is the thing you should do. This is the thing you should do. That's transactional leadership. Tell them what to do. Make sure that they did it. Tell them to do something else. That's always going to be more complex. That's always going to bottleneck you and them from making progress. You're going to hit that ceiling of complexity.

But the second you do transformational leadership, you surround around an outcome that you agree on together. You agree on the ways that success is measured and then you coach them up to success. That's how you're going to really remove that ceiling. You're going to blast through the ceiling in 2019. You're going to simplify things and your income, your happiness, your time freedom is going to just massively, massively blow up and increase this year.

Okay. So find where you keep hitting ceilings. Likely things are too complicated. Things are too complex. Blast through the complexity by pulling back and adding in some intentional time to go, how do I make this simpler? How do I make this simpler for me? How do I make this simpler for those around me? How do I make it so others can make decisions and they're not just waiting on me to give them something to do? How do I remove myself from

from Bottle Neck here or other people from Bottle Neck and help the whole machine succeed more. You can go check out our Epic Planning Call. Excuse my voice, y'all. Carrot.com/epic. You can download or you don't download, you'll see the entire Epic Planning Call that so many people said it's going to completely change the trajectory of their year. Some of them said the trajectory of their life.

Download my routine and goal habit tracker that I use to keep my habits in place. In that habit tracker and goal tracker, it actually has, here's my top five priorities for the month, here's my top five priorities for the week, and here's my top five priorities for the day. It's this waterfall that cascades down so I can make sure I'm getting ahead of my planning and I can share that with my team so my team at all times knows what my top five priorities are. Half of my top five priorities at any given time right now

are always based on creating a system and me getting out of the way, simplifying the machine so we can blast through the ceilings of complexity that we've got. All right. I'm going to rest my voice a little bit. You guys have an amazing, amazing rest of the week. Go to...

Carrot.com forward slash epic. Grab that call and those resources if you haven't already. And keep an eye out because we've got the Carrot Summit coming up January 9th and 10th. So by the time that you listen to this, the Carrot Summit is going to be almost fully underway. Go to CarrotSummit.com. CarrotSummit.com. It's called the Market Leader Summit.

We have 11 plus top investors from around the country joining us live on January 9th and 10th. I'm going to be bringing some guests on live. I've pre-recorded a couple conversations already, but we're going to be streaming the whole thing live over the internet completely for free. Go to carrotsummit.com and grab your ticket. If you can't make it, we do have recordings for sale. You can pre-order the recordings for the full two days. It's going to be about 10 hours of content and the resources.

you can pre-order them for only $100. It's a pre-order sale. You get over 50% off if you go to carrotsummit.com.

Join for free. It doesn't cost you anything to join the summit for free. But if you miss any of those sessions, you can get the recordings for only $100, 50% off right now. That price will go up to $200 once the summit starts. So if you get your order in, there's an offer that you'll see after you grab your free ticket. It'll say, hey, do you want the recordings for 50% off to pre-order them? If you do, just go ahead and grab them. If not, you can grab them for $200 later once the summit is underway. But the Carrot Summit...

Summit is going to be where we dive in. Day one is going to be all about driving more traffic and leads and negotiating closing more deals in 2019. How do we navigate opendoor.com and Offerpad and Keller Williams getting into the buyer side of things? Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? I happen to think it's a good thing. I'll tell you why during the summit and how to navigate it. How do we make marketing work even better in this environment?

We have some of the biggest investors in the country talking about exactly what they're doing to make their marketing work better. And then day two is going to be all about how do you get more time freedom? How do you build in systems and processes? How do you grow a team? That's going to be all of day two. Go to carrot summit.com, grab your free ticket, grab the recordings at the pre-sale offer. If you want to grab the recordings and spread it around y'all, because this summit can completely change the game for 2019 for you. Pair that up with the Epic planning call, which is also free, tons of free resources for you.

go to carrots.com forward slash epic, and that'll help you plan your life and your business for the year. All right, have an amazing year. I'm going to rest my voice, blast through those ceilings of complexity, y'all, by simplifying. And I'm here to help you guys grow, make a bigger impact, and grow those finances, the flexibility and the freedom that you're putting out there in the world with your company in 2019. Thank y'all.